medicine
oracknows | April 8, 2008Here's another case of measles associated with failure to vaccinate:
Health officials in Milwaukee County are urging parents to make sure their kids are up to date with vaccinations. This comes on the heels of a confirmed case of measles in a 23 month old Franklin resident.
Measles is a highly contagious airborne virus that's easily spread. Symptoms are similar to a common cold: coughing, a runny nose, a high fever and eventually, a red blotchy rash that starts on the head and spreads to the arms and legs. While health officials aren't sure how the 23 month old contracted the virus, they do…
oracknows | April 8, 2008I thought I might start developing chest pain when I read it, but to my shock NCCAM has actually funded some worthwhile research! Even more amazingly, NCCAM described it in a press release!
Too bad it supports the contention that acupuncture is nothing more than placebo and that the attention given by the practitioner is what really accounts for much of the perceived therapeutic effect that patients attribute to it.
I'll explain.
The press release to which I refer leads to a rather interesting study that examines the components of the placebo effect. The article, published online yesterday in…
oracknows | April 7, 2008...or so says #1 Dinosaur, who was buried under a blizzard of radiology reports.
I tend to agree up to a point, but the only problem from my perspective is this: Until recently, it was not at all uncommon for me to get seemingly millions of copies of every radiology report for mammography, ultrasound, and core needle biopsies on my patients. There's a preliminary report, a final report, an amended report, a report with the pathology report added, a report with the pathology report and the estrogen/progesterone receptor status added, and then multiple copies of the final report. We ended up…
oracknows | April 7, 2008This story, first brought to my attention by Drugmonkey, is something that I've been meaning to blog about since I first saw it. The reason, of course, should be obvious, given that my career is an example of the end product that the medical school described is going to be designed to produce: that of a physician-scientist:
The Scripps Research Institute and Scripps Health are working to set up what they hope will be the nation's first medical school entirely geared to training physicians for dual careers in research and patient care.
[...]
The Scripps institute must raise $150 million in…
denialism | April 6, 2008I must admit I have a love-hate relationship with Bill Maher. He is a funny guy, he is good at mocking some of the more ludicrous aspects of politics, and he has been an effective critic of this administration and some of its more egregious policies.
However, I've also long held the position that both liberals and conservatives alike must own up to their own extremists. Liberals must own up to the fact that they don't have a universally-solid grasp on scientific truth, and just like the right wingers, we have people and movements within the left wing that are cranky and denialist. I would…
oracknows | April 6, 2008Dear Mr. Kirby and Mr. Olmsted:
You are both journalists. I realize that neither of you at present work for the traditional press and that both of you seem to devote yourselves mainly to blogging (Mr. Olmsted at the Age of Autism and Mr. Kirby at the Huffington Post), but I have to believe that you both still consider yourselves to be at heart journalists. That is why I am writing this to you and posting it publicly on my blog. If you've ever read any of my posts on this issue, you probably realize that I strongly disagree with your positions and that at times I have been quite harsh in my…
oracknows | April 5, 2008...at the Cancer Research Blog Carnival #8, hosted over at The Skeptical Alchemist.
Just the thing to while away a Saturday afternoon!
oracknows | April 5, 2008How on earth did I miss this article, which describes a paper to be published in the journal Neuroquantology showing how teens can actually have telekinetic powers?
Oh, wait. Look at the date it was published. Never mind.
Not bad, though.
oracknows | April 4, 2008Woo has patterns. I've learned to see them, and, if you read Your Friday Dose of Woo on a regular basis, perhaps you're starting to see them too. Not that I had originally intended to become so well-versed in woo that I start to notice these things. What really happened is that I just sort of fell into it when one day I happened to come up with the idea for this little Friday feature. Truth be told, it seems to have grown and taken on a life of its own, such that on weeks when I don't do it (like last week), something about the blog just doesn't feel right. On the other hand, it sometimes…
oracknows | April 4, 2008Your Friday Dose of Woo has been interrupted to bring you an important rant. The previously scheduled installment will be delayed and will appear later on in the day.
This is more important.
A common characteristic of cranks and denialists, be they antivaccinationists or large corporations or whatever, is an intolerance of criticism for their views. All too frequently, this has taken the form of the abuse of the legal system in order to try to silence their opponents. The Society of Homeopaths did it to a blogger a while back. A quack by the name of Joseph Chikelue Obi did it to the same…
oracknows | April 3, 2008I thought it was an April Fools' joke, but it wasn't. It was posted one day too late, but there it was staring at me:
On World Autism Day: A Plea for Better Journalism.
On the surface, who could argue with that, particularly with David Kirby's regular carpet-bombing logic and science with unctuous and slimy speculation and prevarication? Definitely, such deceptive antivaccination-sympathetic "journalism" needs to go.
But then I noticed who wrote this article.
Dan Olmsted.
Yes, Dan Olmsted, perhaps the worst journalist ever when it comes to autism, the man who swallowed whole anecdotal and…
oracknows | April 3, 2008Believe it or not, there was a time when I didn't consider acupuncture to be a form of woo.
I know, I know, it's hard to believe, given the sorts of posts I've done recently on acupuncture, but it's true. Certainly, I didn't believe the whole rigamarole about needles somehow "restoring the flow of qi" or anything like that, but I did wonder if maybe there was some physiologic mechanism at work behind acupuncture that produced real benefits in terms of pain relief above that of placebo. Sure, I may have dismissed homeopathy as the pure magical thinking that it was, but acupuncture I wasn't so…
sb admin | April 2, 2008I'm not sure what to make of this. An article in the latest Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) reports some potentially good news for type II diabetics. Type II diabetes has been extensively studied (detailed post to follow), and one area of difficulty has been reducing the incidence of macrovascular disease (heart attack and stroke, primarily). Treating blood pressure and cholesterol aggressively in diabetics helps, but controlling blood sugars closely doesn't seem to help with these particular sequelae of diabetes.
Further complicating the picture was some data released…
oracknows | April 2, 2008This happened last week when I was feeling under the weather, and somehow I never got around to it. Fortunately, however, I've learned that there may indeed by justice in the case of Madeline Neuman, the 11-year-old child whose parents let her die of diabetic ketoacidosis. This story was widely reported thusly:
"We just believe in the Bible, that's all. This is our faith," said Leilani Neumann, the mother of 11-year-old Madeline Neumann, who died from a treatable form of diabetes after her parents chose to pray for their daughter in place of seeking medical attention.
Madeline Neumann had…
oracknows | April 1, 2008In the three years that I've been blogging, one thing I've learned about myself is that I'm not very good at coming up with good April Fools' Day posts. Yes, I have tried it before. For example, a couple of years ago, I tried to make everyone believe that I had gone soft on woo, that I had had a change of heart.
No one was fooled, for even a moment, and if there's something a good April Fools' Day post has to have if it's going to be believable long enough for the "April Fool!" punchline to be surprising, it's a plausible story. Let's face it, Orac saying he's starting to groove on homeopathy…
j7uy5 | April 1, 2008This is something that has been brewing for a while. I
noticed a trend among medical students, over the years, with increasing
numbers of them expressing support for universal health care in the USA.
Now it is official. A study published in the Annals of
Internal Medicine today (1 April 2008) indicates that, for the first
time, a majority of US physicians now express support for universal
health care coverage.
It isn't even particularly close. In 2002, 49 percent of
physicians supported national health insurance; 40 percent opposed it.
But in six years, the numbers have changed a lot…
sb admin | March 31, 2008A reader, who happens to write one of the best-named blogs on teh tubes, pointed me toward an article I never would have seen. This parallels a news story we had here in the States late last year. So, since the story is getting press overseas (albeit late), it's time to dust off the old post and update it a bit.
The story repeats the finding that processed meats increase the risk of colon cancer. This news comes from a large report published by the World Cancer Research Fund, which looks at data surrounding diet and cancer. It states that there is no safe level of processed meat…
oracknows | March 31, 2008I have to admit that this one fell off the radar, even for me. I hate to admit it, but it's true.
I'm talking about the Cancer Research Blog Carnival, which is being hosted by the Skeptical Alchemist this Friday.
So, those of you inclined to write about cancer and cancer research, help a blogger out and submit your work to the Skeptical Alchemist before Friday and then come back to check out the carnival then.
sb admin | March 31, 2008I love this story because it shows how evidence-based medicine works, even in the face of corporate greed.
A while back I told you about a cholesterol study with negative results; that is, it failed to show a drug to be helpful. Intimately entwined with the study design was a potential conflict of interest on the part of the drug company, but science won out---data, after all, is data.
Then, few months ago, another set of (preliminary) cholesterol data was released by Merck and Schering-Plough, after much prodding, regarding their drugs Vytorin and Zetia.
Zetia has been quite popular. A…
oracknows | March 31, 2008I've never been able to figure out how anyone who claims to be devoted to science and scientific medicine can take homeopathy the least bit seriously. None of it makes any sense scientifically. Its basic principal of the "Law of Similars" has far more basis in the concepts of sympathetic magic than anything that science has to say, while its concept that diluting a substance (with shaking--a homeopath will always tell you that the shaking is absolutely necessary!) far beyond the point where there is likely to be even a single molecule of the remedy left actually makes it more potent has no…